They went back to the old house in Catskill last Saturday afternoon. It was the same rambling white house with the grey roof and the low porch where they had lived so many years before. But, even though they were going home to see the woman who had been a mother to both of them, no one could have mistaken Mike Tyson and Jay Bright for brothers.
When they began their journey upstate by climbing into the fighter's limousine in New York, they provided a study in contrast. It was not just that one was black and the other white, or that Tyson was the infamous boxer and Bright his obscure trainer. Tyson's squat figure was still edged with the menace which once made him the "baddest man on the planet". Bright cut a cuddlier picture with his camp arch of an eyebrow, a silvery beard and his chubby girth.
But they were bound together by the house and, especially, by the couple who had lived there: the late Cus D'Amato and Camille Ewald, the now 94-year-old woman waiting for them in Catskill. The legendary boxing trainer and his partner had rescued both boys as broken 13-year-olds.
Bright still lives at home with Camille, and he and Tyson continue to look after her. As they left the city for Catskill last weekend, that strange link between them glinted again.
"We talked all the way there and back," Bright remembers. "We spoke about boxing and flying to London the following day. We were excited. But we also talked about Camille and Cus, those incredible people who had taken us in.
"We had a great meal with Camille. She'll be 95 in March but she was so happy to see us get our chance in Europe. Mike and me then went out to Cus's grave. Mike said a prayer over the gravestone. It was a wonderful day, a very beautiful day.
"So I find it unfair that everyone expects Mike to be throwing furniture out of his hotel window or chewing the legs off chairs. If Mike was truly the Hannibal Lecter everyone makes him out to be, he wouldn't visit his surrogate mother or pray in private over Cus's grave. Mike Tyson as the raging monster is a colourful metaphor which sells newspapers. It has little to do with the Mike I know."
In March, it will be exactly 20 years since Tyson was first taken to the Catskill house. Abandoned by his father and estranged from his mother, he was already in a kind of jail. But in 1980, as an inmate of the Tryon juvenile detention centre, he had discovered hope in boxing.
When D'Amato saw the massive teenager spar a few rounds he was convinced. He had seen the future heavyweight champion of the world. D'Amato had already won the title with Floyd Patterson - but Patterson had been crushed later by Sonny Liston and humiliated by Muhammad Ali. Tyson was far more imposing. At 13 he had the raw tools of a dark trade. Cus took him inside.
"This is the one I've been waiting for all my life," he told Camille. But she was compelled by a different image. Mike ran up the long drive which stretched from the bottom of their rolling green garden. His face was full of shy delight when he asked if he could pick some flowers to take back to Tryon. He had never seen roses before.
Three months later on June 30 1980, the day he turned 14, Tyson was released into D'Amato's custody. In the Catskill house he was the only black kid alongside seven white boys. Bright was the oldest, having lived there for almost seven years.
When D'Amato first met him the 12-year-old Bright weighed some 385lb (27 stone). "I had a 56-inch waist," Bright recalls, "but I loved boxing. I used to go up to the Catskill house on my vacations. After a year in Cus's gym I got down to 175lb (12 stone)."
Bright's mother had died when he was 11. A year later he lost his father and then, less than a year after that, his brother. Three deaths in two years were too much for a 13-year-old boy to take. He asked Cus and Camille if he could stay in Catskill - and he's never really left since.
"It was hard for Mike in the beginning," Bright says. "He was very suspicious. I understood. He came from a neighbourhood where it was eat or be eaten. It takes a long while for those layers of street callousness to dissipate. But slowly he began to open his heart and trust people.
"I sense a similar process in London. After all the cynicism in America it's been so refreshing to be here. Mike's responding to the way British people have embraced him. We should have done this years ago."
Bright's return to Tyson's corner, working alongside Tommy Brooks as co-trainer, is one of the least publicised features of rusty Mike's latest comeback. Within boxing, Bright has always been ridiculed. Teddy Atlas and Kevin Rooney, both former D'Amato disciples, have been particularly scathing since his debut as a Tyson cornerman in 1989.
"Jay Bright has no boxing knowledge," Rooney jeered, "unless you count quiche-making as a useful quality." Atlas sneered of the Bright-Tyson partnership that "it's like wearing plastic thongs under an Armani suit. It's ridiculous."
"Anyone who reinforces the style Cus ingrained in Mike is doing a good job," Bright insists. "I'm just trying to apply Cus's methods."
Bright is a walking talking D'Amato doll. Even if he is unlikely to rekindle in a 34-year-old fighter the dazzling lateral movement and fast combinations which remain the tenets of the Cus creed, his devotion is obvious.
"Cus always said Tyson is at his best when he's calm and cool. When he has that dead calm he sees the openings and, boom, he throws devastating combinations. It's now politically correct to dismiss Mike. But all his problems in the ring have been down to enforced inactivity. He still has the knowledge and technique; even Evander Holyfield said Tyson knocks out Lennox Lewis. The book is not yet closed."
If Bright's boxing dreams appear more romantic than realistic, his personal perceptions of Tyson are no less sentimental.
"Mike is a great guy. With all my heart I don't believe he raped Desiree Washington. Neither does Camille. She's a tough, smart Ukrainian woman and she never wavered."
Yet the bleak saga of Tyson - both the terrible distress he has caused and the pain he has suffered - is essentially a story of violently broken trust. In 1997 he said: "I've been abused, I've been humiliated, I've been dehumanised. I've been betrayed. I have no friends. When I came out of prison I realised that you can give people all the money in the world and it can't make them loyal to you in their hearts."
Bright was one of those he cast out. He was blamed for Tyson's first defeat by Holyfield and fired. So he was not in the corner when Tyson's parody of Jaws ended up with him biting chunks out of Holyfield's ears in the rematch.
"Don King and the rest were whispering to Mike," Bright says. "But I still wished Mike well. I watched the second Holyfield fight on TV and it broke my heart to see what he did. But a few weeks later we spoke again and everything was fine. You see, I was never a hired gun or a mercenary, I was always a friend before anything."
For those of us who have followed Tyson's mazy path for years, it is difficult to believe that he has found serenity. But in Jay Bright he has a staunch believer.
"Mike's very deep. The other day he was having his hands wrapped and we started talking about Alexander the Great. He was articulate and thoughtful. Ask Mike about philosophy and you're in for a treat. Ask him about Nietzsche; that's his man! He knows all that stuff. Is that an uneducated person?"
Bright and Tyson are boxing's definitive odd couple. But it's a sweeter image to think of them discussing philosophical theories of eternal reoccurrence in the gym than to see Tyson repeating the same forlorn pattern of mistakes.
"What you have to do when trouble follows you," Bright says," is adopt a mature attitude and avoid it. Mike has matured. He is strong and emotionally balanced now. He's focusing on the things that are most important in his life: his boxing and his family."
"And his friends?" I wonder.
"Well," Bright says slowly as he looks away. "Mike knows I'm his friend. He knows I'm loyal. I think he genuinely trusts and respects me. He doesn't feel that about everyone..."
Useful links:
Frank Warren's Boxing site
Mike Tyson Unofficial Page
Mike Tyson psychiatric report
Immigration Rules (Home Office site)
